I hope that you and yours are safe. My friends are fighting fires trying to cross the firebreaks around their home with hoes and shovels as well as water.
Meanwhile, fiery political darts are being hurled at producers of fossil fuels, users (that includes all of us), and politicians who resist a Green New Deal. Joe Biden called President Trump a “climate arsonist.”
Has climate change produced conditions leading to “unprecedented” fires? Did CO2 emissions cause the change? And can it be stopped by reducing those emissions?
The COVID-19 lockdowns have hinted at what a drastic change would be needed to get to “net zero.” With automobile traffic cut in half in April, and air traffic virtually halted for months, CO2 emissions were down only 8 percent—and more than 600,000 people were out of work.
Before prescribing a still more drastic remedy, let’s consider the diagnosis:
1. The fires are not unprecedented. The figure below shows that acreage burned was much greater in the early 20th century.
2. Wildfires are affected by many variables:
- Sun’s variations and earth-sun orbital variation
- Extraterrestrial impacts such as meteorites
- Lightning
- Fuel loads
- Animal grazing
- Climate: rainfall + temperature
- Human activities: soil condition, land use, controlled burning, arson
We could change forest management practices NOW. Reducing CO2 emissions to zero MIGHT reduce temperature by 0.05 degrees Celsius by 2050.